Microgrid

The power grid of the future is in a rural town in Alaska, at least according to our guest Peter Asmus.

In his new book, Alaska's Microgrid Innovators, he talks about an isolated community in Cordova that has overcome disasters, baked in a data center, and enhanced their use of renewables, all while keeping rates on par or even lower than utilities in denser continental grids.

How did they do it? Let's find out.

So, Peter, this is your fifth book on energy, and I'm curious to hear from you.

And it's not just for emergencies.

Microgrids can also help manage energy costs by storing power when electricity is cheap and using it when prices spike.

In some places, they're even selling power back to the grid during peak demand.

That sounds like a no-brainer.

All right, Josh, the last question I want to ask you is a little different, and it, uh, I s- it's like a hot topic at the moment, hotly debated, on which I think you'll have an opinion, even if it's not exactly in your wheelhouse or what you're doing at ThinkLab, which is there are tens of gigawatts of data centers now that are being planned with behind-the-meter generation, and increasingly because of challenges in grid connection and all the moratoria and stuff like that, uh, that behind-the-meter generation is acting a- as a bridge to a long-term interconnect.

And so these are essentially, they're operating these massive microgrids, or they're planning to operate these massive microgrids, right? And it's comprised usually of some kind of gas generation or, or a fuel cell maybe.

There's a UPS.

Maybe there's a battery.

And I wonder, you know, the debate that I think is raging right now is, like, is that harder than it seems, basically? Um, i- is it going to be operationally very difficult to run one of these very large loads that probably doesn't-- that has, like, a spiky load profile off of this gigantic microgrid? From what you know about operations of a macrogrid, do you think it's gonna be easy or hard? I mean, or, you know, what's the, what's the nuance here?

Well, it's a bit of both.

[laughs] But, uh, I think we were building microgrids on the distribution side since the, well, nineties and 2000s, right? We, we understand that- Uh, they can add a lot of, a bit of local resiliency, but let's remember why we have a grid in the first place, which is so that we don't become individual islands.

And individual islands are always more expensive than sharing the resources that we have.